HONcode: Medical Question Answering Application January 20, 2010

All of my blogs are accredited by the Health on the Net Foundation because I consider this an important step in a medical blog’s life. They have recently conducted a survey about the service and they wanted to know how users would implement web 2.0 tools into medical websites (results in pdf). You can also check the new web 2.0 guidelines out.

HONcode announced HONqa, a question answering application.

The number of documents for a given request is constantly increasing, but the search for information for the lay person has not changed at all! While some rely on the advent of the Semantic Web to generate new intelligent search engines, others hope to facilitate the interaction with search engines by providing question answering (QA) systems. These are based mainly on heuristics and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms and the use of redundancy of information.

The goal of such systems is to provide relevant answers to a question in natural language. Thus the user directly accesses the information required and does not have to go through all the documents proposed by the search engine.

It’s far from perfect, but will definitely improve in the future.